Piero Della Francesca

More than any other Italian 15th-century painter, Piero della Francesca was responsible for the development of Renaissance painting in Florence, and its crucial dissemination throughout Italy. His work represents a synthesis of Italian painting, with its focus on perspective and space, and Netherlandish painting, which stressed light and natural phenomena.
From his formative years in Florence, when he worked with Domenico Veneziano in the church of Sant'Egidio, to his seminal mid-career frescoes in the church of San Francesco in Arezzo, and his later work in Rome, Perugia, and Urbino, these pages capture Piero's extraordinary palette, his development of perspective, and the remarkably expressive faces of his subjects.
The recently cleaned Arezzo frescoes are a particular treasure, and the author traces their restoration, as well as critical studies on the artist, and the attribution and subject matter of his works, to set them in the framework of the artistic and philosophical world that Piero inhabited. This is an important and luxurious study of one of the founders of the Italian Renaissance.

Maurizio Calvesi is professor of art history at the University of Rome, and is the author of numerous articles and catalogs.